8.22.2010

For example, Steve Jobs of NeXT is a very tough client. If he does not like something, you hand it to him and he says, "that stinks." There is no discussion. On the other hand, I was lucky enough, I suppose, when I did the logo for him. After he saw the presentation of it, he got up - we were all at his house, sitting on the floor, you know, Hollywood style, with the fireplace going, hot as hell outside. He got up and looked at me and said, "Can I hug you." Now that is overcoming a conflict between the client and the designer"

8.03.2010

the apprentice clodpool, in a rebellious mood, approached wen and spake thusly:

master, what is the difference between a humanistic, monastic system of belief in which wisdom is sought by means of an apparently nonsensical system of questions and answers, and a lot of mystic gibberish made up on the spur of the moment?

6.27.2010

farm house pie (multi-layer leek pie) comes with a poem on the box, written in chinese and english:

preparing me chicken and rice, old friend,
you entertain me at your farm.
we watch the green trees that circle your village
and the pale blue of outlying mountains.
we open your window over garden and field,
to talk mulberry and hemp with our cups in our hands.
... wait till the mountain holiday
I am coming again in chrysanthemum time.

6.21.2010

I found this amazing line seconds into skimming a very very old book. given how old this novel is, I am moved by the author's sight into the future. can you guess who the author is, and what novel this is from? if you can identify it without googling it, consider yourself extremely well read in science fiction. a hint: the book's future date is year 2000. [if you google, may get one hit: from google's scan of the original. I hid the name of the character to make guessing the source a bit harder]

"It appears to me, Miss xxxxx," I said, "that if we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained, and ceased to strive for further improvements."

[of course he could not have predicted the copyright mess we found ourselves in. this was written before music cartels existed.]

3.23.2010

I have been playing with and testing four photography workflow tools. each one has something I like and dislike. the thing I dislike about lightroom is all the hype. It is a good tool, but not the best for everything. so now, lightroom 3 (in beta) has a new rendering engine. wonderful. it really needed one. I have been looking at that engine, and i would say adobe has more work to do. these are basic tiff extracts from capture 1 pro (first image) and lightroom 3 (b2)(second image), with no changes to images. basically: import raw, export tiff. look at the detail at both, and tell me if the difference you see is the result of sharpening or differently capable de-mosaic algorithm. I am reasonably certain it is the latter, because no amount of tinkering with lightroom sharpening tools will match the capture 1 pro image.

really. all because of the chain. you see, the faint impression you get from capture 1 pro rendering is that something with a unique structure. lightroom gives you something indistinct: a rope, or wire, or chain, whatever. the correct answer is that it is a chain with long straight pieces and loops[*], as it faintly appears to be with capture 1 pro.

is this important? i think so. beyer interpolation is a way of guessing what you don't know. better guessers produce image data that is more realistic. everything else in your digital darkroom follows from that.

[* you are thinking: you already knew this. answer: i did not. after looking at the capture 1 pro rendering and thinking "how odd" I went back and examined nearly a dozen images of the suleymanie mosque ceiling with good details of the chains that hold the giant light fixture. now I know what they look like.]

1.27.2010

this is the fast luhn validation code in go that uses the pre-calculated numeric transformation table, and a toggle-free left-to-right scan i came up with. details are found here. [again, i excluded the isdigit check]